The fact that Portugal maintains special cultural and human relations with France is not new. This is for sure France and Portugal cross season 2022 (Implemented by the Institut Français) Through the various exhibitions scattered throughout France, we realize the number of artists and intellectuals who have resided and worked in our capital since the nineteenth century. Le Portugal, petit pays situé au bout du continent Européen, à la fois maritime et terrien, s’est toujours mesuré au reste du monde, et les Portugais, en quête d’évolution, ont pris l’habitude de voyager entre leur pays et Luminous city.
Moderna Lusitania
The country is even more isolated because it will remain frozen for so long in the dictatorship of Salazar, Estado Novo (1933-1974), forcing those who wanted to flee from a stifling, reactionary, highly religious society, without freedom of thought. And don’t innovate… In her exhibition “Portuguese Modernism” at Maison Caillebotte, curator Anne Bonin opens the door to the little-known history of Portuguese Modernism, from the 1920s to the 1970s. The first movement was led by poets Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) and Mario de Sá Carneiro (1890-1916) through their revision ” Orpheus ».
Antonio Dacosta, Sina Aberta, 1940, h / t, 160 x 200 cm, Lisbon, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. © Paulo Costa. On display at Caillebotte’s house, Lyris.
An adventure involving the duo Delaunay, refugees in northern Portugal during the 14th war. excitement “De Pessoa Meets” synchronization By Robert Delaunay As Sonia, observing the rural life of Minho, continues to associate modern forms and objects of popular culture with the goal of total art. A small artistic circle surrounded them between 1915 and 1917, shaped by four artists, Amadeo de Souza Cardoso, José Pacheco, Almada Negreros, and Eduardo Viana, all inspired by light, color and craftsmanship. Most of them had already resided in Paris before the war or in the interwar period. But the person most embodiment of Parisian cosmopolitanism is Vieira da Silva, aided by her husband Arpad Szenes, a couple whose lives will consist of constant back and forth but who end up settling permanently in Paris and obtaining French citizenship in 1956.
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva optical instrument, 1937, h / t, 65 x 53.7 cm, Rouen, Musée des Beaux-Arts © RMN-GP / Cantini Museum, Marseille
Glorious Vieira da Silva
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908-1992) has a special place in the history of this modernity. She also enjoys, during this “season”, browsing the past at the Cantini Museum in Marseille. The person who will become a leader Abstract landscape At the Paris School, he would take a big place in international art. In 1928, she traveled to Italy, where she developed a passion for perspective. Based in Paris, she trained with painters Friesz and Bissière while attending Fernand Léger’s studio, and befriended gallery owner Jeanne Bucher, who encouraged her and became a major figure in her life.
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva in her studio, rue de l’Abbé Carton, 1960 © Ida Kar
In Paris, she met Hungarian-Jewish painter Arpad Szines, whom she married in 1930. In 1931, they stopped in Marseille, where she was fascinated by the metal architecture of the carriage bridge. She often returned to Lisbon during the 1930s and gradually abandoned photography, wanting to reinvent the notion of space, moving toward the kind of highly constructed abstraction made up of geometric structures, grids, spirals, checkers, and little squares that she evokes. azulejos from his country. During the war, the couple escaped the Nazis and went to live in Rio de Janeiro where Maria Helena was uprooted and worried, making the human form reappear in her paintings. They return to Paris, where the booming 1950s began. The viewer’s eye plunges into the heart of its rhythmic graphics, its labyrinths, its fleeting mosaics, its increasingly abstract imaginative cities.
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, La Scala or Eyes, 1937, oil on canvas, 60 x 92 cm © DR, Cortesi Jean Bucher Jaeger, Paris-Lisbon
New generation
Vieira da Silva occupies a favorite spot in the CCC Olivier Debré in Tours with an impressive self-portrait, amidst her fellow female artists from 1900 to 2020, brought together in the exhibition All I Want. Among these forty artists, we will remember Helena Almeida and her portraits of a man’s body, Patricia Garrido (born in 1963) pressing her family’s furniture into cubes, Ana Vieira (1940-2016) and her dining room in a translucent blue nylon net.
Helena Almeida, Sedozer, 2002, Photo paper, photography and acrylic paint, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Portugal © Photo Pedro Pina
Most notable are the four extraordinary portraits of another great Portuguese star, Paula Rego (1935-2022), who died this month. This brilliant Lisbon-born artist, who was spotted by the French in 2018 at the Musée de l’Orangerie, is actually part of the London School, having had a retrospective in 2021 at Tate Britain. His painting, a narrative, theatrical, and realistic depiction, depicts difficult, sometimes rough human situations, imprinted on them with a violent, even cruel, but unforgettable rage of vital force and courageous will. Close to Lucian Freud, she is nonetheless a feminist, all in the nuances. His “living paintings” cause trouble and anxiety.
Paula Rego, Vanitas, 2006, Pastel on stapled paper on aluminum, tri-colour panel, 110 x 130 cm, Lisbon, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. © Bridgeman Pictures. Shown at CCCOD, Tours
owns
“Portuguese Modernity”
Caillebotte House, 8, rue de Concy, 91330 Yerres
www.maisoncaillebotte.fr
Until October 30 2022
Vieira da Silva, Eye of the Labyrinth
Cantini Museum, 19 Rue Grignan, 13006 Marseille
www.museums.marseille.fr
Until November 6, 2022
Then at the Museum of Fine Arts in Dijon
1 avenue Rameau, 21000 Dijon
www.beaux-arts.dijon.fr
From December 16 to April 4, 2023
” All I Want. Portuguese Artists from 1900 to 2020 »
Olivier Debre Center for Contemporary Creativity (CCCOD)
François Air Park, 37,000 flights
www.cccode.fr
Until September 4, 2022
to read
Portuguese ModernsAnd the under the monastery. Written by Anne Boonen, In Fine ed. Art (French/English/Portuguese, 192 pages, €32)
Vieira da Silva, Eye of the Labyrinth, Collective, In Fine ed. Art (French / English, 288 pages, 200 m, 35 €)
All I want / tudo o que eu querounder the monastery. By Helena de Freitas and Bruno Marchand, bilingual French/Portuguese catalog, supported by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (336 pages, €35)
Paula Rigo’s cruel tales, editor. Orsay Museum / Flamarion, 2018 (39 euros)
